ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero Wi-Fi Z390 Motherboard Review: Page 7 of 9

Performance Testing

General Performance Testing

All performance testing was done with an i9-9900K and RTX 2080 at default clock speed. CPU was left with Speed Step and Turbo Boost enabled. The only setting changed was enabling XMP II (stock, not ASUS-optimized) memory settings in the BIOS. Games were run at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and higher settings enabled as noted to place the load on the CPU and motherboard rather than the GPU. ASUS’s MCE was disabled.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is the complete benchmark for the modern office. It is the ideal test for organizations that are evaluating PCs for a workforce with a range of performance needs. The tests in this benchmark cover a wide range of activities from everyday productivity tasks to demanding work with digital media content.PCMark 10 uses a modular approach to build relevant benchmark tests around common end-user scenarios. A Test Group is a collection of workloads that share a common theme or purpose. There are four test groups in PCMark 10, we use three of them.Essentials: covers the common, everyday ways that people use a PC. The workloads include Web Browsing, Video Conferencing, and App Start-up time. Productivity: measures system performance with everyday office applications. This test group includes the Spreadsheets and Writing workloads.Digital Content Creation: This test group's workload reflects the demands of working with digital content and media. The tests include Photo Editing, Video Editing, and Rendering and Visualization.

While ASUS’s ROG Maximus XI Hero WiFi takes 2nd place in overall score, it is the fastest in essentials.

WebXPRT 2015

WebXPRT 2013 uses scenarios created to mirror the tasks you do every day to compare the performance of almost any Web-enabled device. It contains four HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads: Photo Effects, Face Detect, Stocks Dashboard, and Offline Notes. WebXPRT is run with the latest stable release version of Google Chrome browser, in this case, Version 61.

821 +/- 11 is a really good score in right in line with what we expect. While not the highest overall score we’ve gotten, it is the lowest +/- deviation at 11.

PassMark PerformanceTest 9Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing and benchmarking. PassMark PerformanceTest allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.

The Hero comes in second place but a very small margin with a score of 7857.

CPU Performance Testing

Super PI Modded 1.5

“In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi in collaboration with Dr.Y.Kanada at the computer center. This record should be the current world record. (Details are shown in the windows help.) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environments such as Windows NT and Windows 95. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes 3 days with a Pentium 90 MHz, 40 MB main memory and 340 MB available storage.”

6 minutes and 56 seconds is one of the fastest ‘stock’ scores we’ve ever gotten and it's faster than most overclocked systems of a year or two ago.

CINEBENCH R15

"CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and much more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and OS X). And best of all: It's completely free."

The benchmark shows a rating of MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. So if you have modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with LZMA method and decompression with LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 20 or more, the score is taken.

A total score of 69,064 is about 20k higher than our former average from the i7-8700K and places the Hero squarely in second place in our list of Z390 boards.

Memory Performance Testing

AIDA64 Engineer Edition

“FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.50 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 1.50 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises. The new AIDA64 update implements AVX-optimized benchmarks for the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors, adds a brand-new video encoding benchmark, and supports the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.”

Using the same memory kit we always use, we see a little lower overall write bandwidth shown in Aida64 on the Maximus XI Hero Wi-Fi but right on target for reads.

Latency comes in a 46.4ns, one of best yet.

Passmark Performance Test - Memory Mark - Threaded

“Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test ™ allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.”

Our threaded Memory Mark score comes in just over 37 thousand, right around what we would expect but a shade less than the Maximus XI Extreme.

SiSoft Sandra

“SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems--or potential headaches.”

SiSoft shows around 30.5GB/s worth of bandwidth on average.

Storage Testing

ATTO Disk Benchmark

“As the industry's leading provider of high-performance storage & network connectivity products, ATTO has created a widely-accepted Disk Benchmark freeware utility to help measure storage system performance. As one of the top tools utilized in the industry, Disk Benchmark identifies performance in hard drives, solid state drives, RAID arrays as well as connections to storage. Top drive manufacturers, like Hitachi, build and test every drive using the ATTO Disk Benchmark"

Our drive is getting quite full so speeds are a little erratic, but they do land around the rated speeds.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0

“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds."

You can see our drive is very full, but still manages to land close to its rated speeds.

AS SSD

The AS SSD benchmark determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests.

The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system cache. In the sequential test, the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file. In the 4K test, read and write performance is determined for randomly selected 4K blocks. The 4K-64 Third test is equivalent to the 4K procedure, except that the read and write operations are distributed to 64 threads. This test should show differences between the IDE operating mode where NCQ is not supported and the AHCI mode for SSDs with Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The additional compression test can measure the performance of the SSD as a function of the compressibility of the data. This is especially important for the controllers that are used to increase the performance and life of the cell compression.

AS SSD usually comes in a bit lower than the other two tests, but we still get a good score. It’s obvious at this point we don’t have any issue with M.2 bandwidth or storage performance.

Game Testing

3DMark – Fire Strike

"Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today's high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today"

Asus lets the 9900K and RTX 2080 power through and gives us a great score, the best overall of our Z390 boards.

3DMark – Time Spy

"3Dmark Time Spy is a new DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spay is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built “the right way” from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards.”

This is one of our best Timespy scores we’ve gotten out of our 9900K and RTX 2080 yet.

Grand Theft Auto: V

"When a young street hustler, a retired bank robber, and a terrifying psychopath find themselves entangled with some of the most frightening and deranged elements of the criminal underworld, the U.S. government and the entertainment industry, they must pull off a series of dangerous heists to survive in a ruthless city in which they can trust nobody, least of all each other.”

The Maximus Xi hero is holding its own in our gaming tests so far and our first real game is the legendary GTA: V which comes in at 173.9 FPS at our settings.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It is the sequel to the 2013 video game Tomb Raider, a reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise. It was released on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in November 2015 and for Microsoft Windows in January 2016. It is set to release for PlayStation 4 in the second half of 2016.

Rise of the Tomb Raider was officially announced in June 2014. The game's storyline follows Lara Croft as she ventures into Siberia in search of the legendary city of Kitezh, whilst battling a paramilitary organization that intends on beating her to the city's promise of immortality. Presented from a third-person perspective, the game primarily focuses on survival and combat, while the player may also explore its landscape and various optional tombs. Camilla Luddington returns to voice and performs her role as Lara.

Rise of the Tomb Raider slides in with an overall score of 61.66FPS, the best of our Z390 boards yet.